Quick Tip – Say “OK Google” in Search

On your phone, “OK Google” is a simple way to get access to Google’s voice search system at any point, even when your screen is off. It’ll even provide you with a set of potential queries to show users the breadth of voice search.

Google’s voice search engine works in a lot of places: phones, watches, and TVs. Android TV devices make it easy to activate search from anywhere and search for something as well. However, if you aren’t sure what you want to search for, you can say “OK Google” (or, as Brian points out, “Help!”). Like on the phone, you’ll see ideas of what to find. It uses the Leanback layout instead, providing cards of ideas divided by different categories like “Games”.

The video above shows a few examples of what you can find. Broad queries like “Show games” will bring up a bunch of games that are pulled from the Google Play Store while direct entries like “Crossy Road” will bring you to an elegant result that links directly to that item in the Play Store.

This does not give you hotword detection. There’s still a need to manually press the voice search button, but now you can see much better what things you are able to find with Google.

Nick Felker is a student Electrical & Computer Engineering student at Rowan University (C/O 2017) and the student IEEE webmaster. When he's not studying, he is a software developer for the web and Android (Felker Tech). He has several open source projects on GitHub (http://github.com/fleker)
Devices: Moto G-2013 Moto G-2015, Moto 360, Google ADT-1, Nexus 7-2013 (x2), Lenovo Laptop, Custom Desktop.
Although he was an intern at Google, the content of this blog is entirely independent and his own thoughts.